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When He Was Seventeen

EARLY on the morning of April 1, 1980, the month before I turned 17, members of the Transport Workers Union walked off their jobs and my adolescence began in earnest. I don’t remember the particulars surrounding the strike, but because I couldn’t get from my Greenwich Village home to the High School of Music and Art on West 135th Street, Easter Vacation (the seasonal breaks from public school then still retained their nonsecular designations) extended into Transit Strike Vacation.

Serendipitously, around the same time, the mother and stepfather of my friend Patrick set out on an African safari, leaving Pat and his sisters alone in their Bleecker Street town house for however long an African tourist safari circa 1980 can be expected to have lasted.

For maybe a dozen of us, the house became home base. We assembled there, ate there, slept there. We kibitzed and played cards and listened to records and watched TV (regular broadcast TV, I should add). We drank beer and smoked cigarettes, lots of both. People lost their virginity, fell in love. Hearts were broken. Friendships and animosities were formed. More important, none of us ever went home, or if we went home it was just to change clothes.

For me, the 11-day transit strike marks the true beginning of a critical shift: from the existence I had until then, one shared mostly with my parents (nurturing, comfortable, semi-claustrophobic), to one that I would fill with friends, girlfriends and my own interests, a life full of exhilarating, scary and sometimes awesomely boneheaded decisions.

I know that for some, adolescence is a process of breaking up with one’s parents. The guiding equation of childhood is need, and whether your needs have been met or gone wanting, upon adolescence they’re replaced wholesale by the entirely different condition of desire, of the kind that parents, qua parents, are inherently unequipped to address. The resulting struggle between parent and child can fall anywhere on the spectrum between “An American Tragedy” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Both of those novels, though, situate their coming-of-age narratives in far more parochial places and far more restrictive times than New York in the early 1980s. My parents took most of the changes I underwent in stride: Hip town, hip kids — that much seems exactly the same today.

But some things have changed a lot over the past 27 years. The level of permissiveness, for one. For example, until I was 16 I’d been subject to a somewhat arbitrary curfew, unless I could persuade my parents that I’d be “spending the night at a friend’s,” that dubiously reassuring pitch. Then I’d presented them with a radical proposal: that I be subject to no curfew at all.

My logic wasn’t impeccable, but it was persuasive. Rather than complain that none of my friends were subject to curfew restrictions (which was true, but who wanted to encourage the old “I don’t care what so-and-so’s mother lets him do; I’m not so-and-so’s mother, I’m your mother” routine?), I told them honestly that leaving wherever it was that I happened to be in order to arrive home at the designated time meant that I was traveling alone throughout the city.

What, I argued, was the difference between midnight and 4 a.m., except that if I were allowed to stay out until whenever with my more liberated friends, I would be traveling within the safety of a large group? My parents thought about it — and agreed.

Never mind that I was often just traveling the three blocks from Pat’s. My parents probably knew that. Not much got by my parents. They probably also knew that Pat’s house was kind of a gateway drug; that I also was going, or very soon would be going, to bars, clubs, and parties all over the city, sometimes even — gasp! — across the river in Brooklyn.

I should confess that I can’t imagine making a similar arrangement with my own kids, the oldest of whom is two years from high school. Are you kidding? The kid’s going to be 12, and my heart’s in my mouth if I send her out for a quart of milk.

When you have kids of your own, Channel 5’s “It’s 10 o’clock — do you know where your children are?” isn’t quite the fodder for hilarity that it was once upon a time. It should also be acknowledged, though, that in allowing me to keep my own hours, my parents were adhering to the norm as fully as I would be violating it by permitting my kids to do as I was.

IT’S time to speak a little of the nature of my relationship with my parents during this period, and of the relationships most kids I knew had with their parents. My folks could be strict, even inflexible, but mostly concerning some aspect of my behavior that impinged directly upon them. When it came to what I chose to do outside the house, they had a single word they frequently directed at me. That word was “big” — as in “You’re big,” usually delivered with a kind of verbal shrug.

“Big” as a concept was just nebulous enough to be meaningless if defined outside the specific context in which it was meant to be applied: Certainly you could be “big” at 4, meaning that you weren’t supposed to blow bubbles in your chocolate milk; you could be “big” at 10, meaning you wrote your own thank-you notes.

Photo

The author at 17, seated at center, with friends on the High Line in Chelsea.Credit
Patrick Adams

But apron strings were untied a lot younger then, and as you grew up it became a word that, when used by your parents in reference to you, signified that as far as they were concerned you were both capable of and responsible for making your own decisions, even if they were stupid ones.

The first time I went to a party, for instance, I made the monumentally stupid decision to sample every type of alcohol available, in immoderate quantities. I returned home, greeted my parents as nonchalantly as I could manage, and threw up all over myself. “Scucciamens,” my father said, not unaffectionately employing a Sicilian insult, as he put me to bed after cleaning me up. “Here’s a pot if you have to puke again. Grab the wall if the room starts to spin.”

“Big” took for granted that things that are now considered taboo to varying degrees (for example, teenage experimentation with cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, peculiar music and clothing, and sex, to name them in the order I discovered them) were necessarily the very things with which kids were going to court encounters, and that such encounters weren’t avoidable accidents but had been sought out, preceded by curiosity and that desire I was talking about earlier.

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The idea was to let the hormonal fires raging at the core of adolescence consume some of the fuel that fed them, while putting it all in a kind of useful perspective. I remember my mother talking frankly to me about her various drug experiences. “Heroin, ugh,” she told me. “I threw up.” I never tried it.

I’M sure some variation of “big” exists now, but as far as I can tell, the social conditions that defined it when I was 17 no longer obtain among the members of what I shall call, for lack of a better term, the educated middle classes of New York. Things were — let’s face it — different then. I will admit to a degree of geezerdom in declaring that New York in 2007 isn’t nearly as interesting a place as New York in 1980.

For that matter, New York wasn’t even as interesting a place in 1985 as it was in 1980. Despite New York’s reputation then for dangerousness, even lawlessness, nobody walked around saying: “My! What a bankrupt and anarchic city! Raise the drawbridge! Another day, another struggle to survive!”

The city went about its business, and in many ways the place was heady and wide open in ways that just aren’t possible now. It’s not just that huge swaths of town have become wall-to-wall enclaves of the well-to-do, with their attendant intolerance for heterodoxy and disorder. In 1980 there were still the vestigial remains of the various downtown revolutions that had reinvigorated New York’s music and art scenes and kept Manhattan in the position it had occupied since the 1940s as the cultural center of the world.

CBGB hadn’t yet closed (or become a tourist trap); it was then one of the few places where interesting new bands could perform. Max’s Kansas City (for live music) and the Mudd Club (for dancing) were still thriving, as well as lesser-known joints like TR-3 and the Rock Lounge. A generation of New York kids was introduced to reggae at Tramps’s “Mod Mondays.” British bands whose United States record sales numbered in the thousands headlined at clubs like Hurrah and Irving Plaza.

No one worried about H.I.V. (granted, that was a fool’s paradise). There was no such thing as crack cocaine, and pot didn’t provide the elephant-gun dose of THC that today’s hydroponic stuff does. The country’s divorce rate peaked around 1980 (I was one of three kids I knew whose parents stayed together), which put something of a crimp in the ideal of parental oversight à la “Father Knows Best” — it wasn’t unusual to run into a friend’s father or mother dancing the night away at the same club you’d gone to.

Maybe most important, I’m one of thousands of aging New Yorkers who took their first legal drink while still in high school. The banishment of the 18-year-old drinking age — and the relegation of American adults of that age to Junior Grown-Up status — meant that certain behaviors were abruptly criminalized. Close readers of this article may have gathered that some of the pertinent laws were mostly honored in the breach to begin with, and that is indeed the case (I had no trouble obtaining alcohol at 14), but when the drinking age rose to 21 in the mid-’80s, with concomitantly tougher enforcement, the handwriting was on the wall.

Above all, I lament the loss of this majority, this legitimacy of behavior, this legal bestowal of the idea of “big.” But the point is that many of the places we gathered, and many of the activities we took part in, abruptly became verboten.

At 17 my friends and I didn’t partake of sanctioned, homogenized “teen culture.” We participated in culture, period, meaning that often we made it ourselves. We were perfectly aware that certain aspects of Western civilization, whether or not they would appear on network television or play on Top 40 radio, had their point of origin in the fertile brains of teenagers.

I’m happy to provide an unscientific postmortem on the casualty rate sustained by those of us raised according to those bygone mores, in those pre-AIDS, pre-crack, pre-Reagan (and pre-Giuliani) times. Most of us survived, and prospered. Many of us are raising our own children.

True, one guy died of complications arising from alcoholism — at 28. Some people struggled with substance abuse. A couple of girls had children while they were still arguably children themselves. There was some anorexia. Not everybody got into the college of his choice. And some kids, running loose on the streets at all hours, fell victim to crime.

Riding the subway early one morning in 1981, I was the victim of an attempted mugging. The attempt failed — they were younger than I — but I was shaken up, and when I got home and found my father reading in his study, which it was his habit to do until late at night, I startled him by lighting a cigarette. It was the first time I’d smoked in front of him. “You really shouldn’t,” he said, “but you’re big.”